Things that make you go…..Really?

Right this minute, eleven accomplished creative professionals have
wedged themselves into a studio in Brooklyn, New York, and are in the
process of putting together the first issue of twenty-four magazine.
twenty-four is a quarterly publication for which each issue is
conceived, written, illustrated, designed, and produced in 24 hours.
The creation of the first issue began at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on
February 23, 2012 and will finish at 10 a.m. on February 24, at which
time PDFs of the planned 64-page magazine will be sent to the 100+
people who backed the project on Kickstarter. Print copies will follow
within a week. The first issue is 100% donation-funded and ad-free.

The first issue has the theme of “trust,” which will be illustrated
and explored in fiction, poetry, articles, interviews, photo essays,
and drawings. In addition, the contributors are documenting their
creative process and soliciting ideas from the public by posting
photos, videos, and text to Twitter (using the hashtag #24mag),Flickr,Storify, YouTube, andTumblr.

In what has become an annual rite of spring, each April the U.S. government releases its Special 301 report – often referred to as the Piracy Watch List – which claims to identify countries with sub-standard intellectual property laws. Canada has appeared on this list for many years alongside dozens of countries. In fact, over 70% of the world’s population is placed on the list and most African countries are not even considered for inclusion.

While the Canadian government has consistently rejected the U.S. list because it “basically lacks reliable and objective analysis”, this year I teamed up with Public Knowledge to try to provide the U.S. Trade Representative Office with something a bit more reliable and objective. Public Knowledge will appear at a USTR hearing on Special 301 today. In addition, last week we participated in meetings at the U.S. Department of Commerce and USTR to defend current Canadian copyright law and the proposed reforms.

The full submission focuses on four main issues: how Canadian law provides adequate and effective protection, how enforcement is stronger than often claimed, why Canada is not a piracy haven, and why Bill C-11 does not harm the interests of rights holders (critics of Bill C-11 digital lock rules will likely think this is self-evident).

New in the Watchismo Vault collection, the $17,500 Devon Tread watches, which use a cunning system of belts and optical sensors to keep and display the time. No, I don’t have $17.5K to drop on something like this, but if you asked me to imagine what a $17.5K watch should look like, it would be something much like this: “The exposed movement is a mesmerizing display of the patented interwoven system of conveyor belts. This series of belts includes critical elements that allow the optical recognition system to know every belt position at all times.”

Jon Rosenberg, creator of the entirely demented Goats webcomic sez, “Just wanted to let you know that it looks like I’m going to be able to do a fourth Goats book, and I’m doing it without a publisher — this one is going to be wholly funded by the readers themselves. The Goats Book IV Kickstarter met its fundraising goal only eighteen hours after it launched, which has made me a bit giddy. The money is nice, but the ability to do projects without big companies backing them is superb.” (Thanks, Jon!)

Carlos Bueno, author of a kids’ book about understanding computers called Lauren Ipsum, describes what happens when the cadre of competing bots that infest Amazon’s sales-database began to viciously fight with one another over pricing for his book. It’s a damned weird story.

Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It’s one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.

It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

The internet has everything.

This would just be an interesting anecdote, except that bot activity also seems to affect books that, you know, actually exist. Last year I published my children’s book about computer science, Lauren Ipsum. I set a price of $14.95 for the paperback edition and sales have been pretty good. Then last week I noticed a marketplace bot offering to sell it for $55.63. “Silly bots”, I thought to myself, “must be a bug”. After all, it’s print-on-demand, so where would you get a new copy to sell?

Then it occured to me that all they have to do is buy a copy from Amazon, if anyone is ever foolish enough to buy from them, and reap a profit. Lazy evaluation, made flesh. Clever bots!

Then another bot piled on, and then one based in the UK. They started competing with each other on price. Pretty soon they were offering my book below the retail price, and trying to make up the difference on “shipping and handling”. I was getting a bit worried.

Sidebar: Lauren Ipsum sounds so interesting, I’ve just ordered a copy to read to my daughter!

Last year I had 250 business cards printed up with printed on them and nothing else. Since then I’ve been finding handy uses for them: writing notes, flirting with girls on the bus, propping up the occasional table, whatever. A nearly-blank business card is a surprisingly useful thing to have around.

The best thing I’ve been using them for is to make meeting lots of people more interesting. I’m normally very nervous about meeting new people, I’m regularly thrust into intimidating situations, and I meet so many different kinds of people that it’s often hard to come up with something to talk about immediately.

Now I ask them to play my game: I hand them a pen and one of these cards and ask them to complete the drawing. No time limit, no wrong answers, do whatever you want. You just have to give it back to me so I can take it home and scan it. Your reward when you’re finished is that you get to see the whole collection of what other people have done. And once a couple of people have done one, that stack grows quickly.

I’ve been collecting these for a while (you can see the full collection on my blog), but last night I stumbled upon Sketch Tuesday (on Wednesday) at the 111 Minna Gallery where dozens of artists from local museums and elsewhere came to draw. This was a particularly fruitful evening for the game, and I’ve put all of the cards I collected after the jump.

A heartening development in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s ongoing effort to secure the Internet’s timezone database, which was threatened when an astrology software company called Astrolabe claimed a copyright in the arrangement of the world’s timezones. After EFF sought sanctions against the company’s lawyers, the company dropped the suit, apologized, and signed a “covenant not to sue.”

In a statement, Astrolabe said, “Astrolabe’s lawsuit against Mr. Olson and Mr. Eggert was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no one’s property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our Complaint. We deeply regret the disruption that our lawsuit caused for the volunteers who maintain the TZ database, and for Internet users.”

On the left, a jewelry design by TattyDevine. On the right, one sold by Claire’s. I suspect that it’s a fairly generic motif, but that really is very close to an exact rip, isn’t it? Except that it’s pink, of course.